I rather like Puppy 4.2, but, upon booting into 4.3, I find the look and feel to have taken a step backward, and, in fact, it turns out that 4.3 was built from 4.1.

Why is this? I realize I could tweak 4.3 to be more like 4.2, but that's just extra work on top of starting from a new pupsave file (since conversion is ugly), reinstalling pets, etc. For now, I'm sticking with 4.2.

If there's a thread or reference page on this already, I'm happy just to be pointed in the right direction. I'm not trying to start a debate and am open to the likely idea that I'm just missing something sensible.

Puppy 4.1.x and 4.3.x were developed by Barry in different standards than the community-built 4.2.x series. The 4.2.x series had all the bling and (useless) eye candy that makes Puppy trash the old-hardware-compatibility agenda.

Besides, many users didn't like 4.2.1's extras, including me. 4.3 feels more professional than 4.2.1.

EDIT: btw, it's not built from or on top of 4.1, it's built using Woof (while 4.1 is built with Unleashed) with pretty much the same applications.

Barry incorporated and updated many features and updates in 4.2.1 into 4.3.1

What are the features carried over from 4.2 to 4.3 that are not just extensions or updates to what was already in 4.1? It seems to me more like the most recent version of everything in 4.1 made it into 4.3 with little reference to 4.2 at all.

Lobster wrote:

However Barry is a minimalist and left out the bling

Is aesthetic (non-"bling") minimalism really the goal here? Let's not kid ourselves: twenty-two desktop icons and five calculators hardly seem to work toward this. I appreciated that 4.2 removed some redundancies and less useful apps, but now they are back in 4.3.

Again, I'm just wondering why. Thanks for any background or history you can give me on these decisions.

Let's not kid ourselves: twenty-two desktop icons and five calculators hardly seem to work toward this.

Thanks for making me smile this morning .

Well people like to impress....some want to make a distro that...whoa...looks kool, others work on the basis of...whoa...how did you fit all that in?

Interestingly microsoft made its fortune using the former approach......plus the big must be good phsycology (worked for CB radios )

So ugly and functional or pretty and iffy........pretty AND functional would be nice.
I took some of the pretty of 4.20 and added it to 4.12 and fixed a few things...is quite a pleasent result....moral...don't accept pupppy as it comes.

And NO, 4.3.x is not built from 4.1 binaries, it includes the same applications in most cases, but updated. Also, 4.3 is not supposed to continue 4.2.x directly.

Someone else on the bug fix forum described 4.3 as "recompiled" from 4.1. Regardless of how you want to qualify it technically, I think we all agree that 4.3 descends from 4.1, generally ignoring the design decisions in 4.2. Thanks for your input, lguleder.

However, 4.2 was not a community edition, even though it was developed by folks other than Barry. Let's move away from the "bling" vs "no bling" distinction. As I stated, that was not the intent of my original post, even though the way I wrote it implied as much.

Perhaps rephrasing my question would help: why for God's sake have the five calculators returned to Puppy in the 4.3 release? Talk about non-minimalism and aesthetic bloat! I would much rather have to add the hiawatha pet separately than have to remove each of these calculators one by one from the Puppy menu.

Of course, my question is about more than the calculators, but maybe narrowing it down to this one topic will help avoid the "bling" debate.

Agreed, and in my opinion the best way to achieve both at the same time is to remove clutter, as it is neither pretty nor functional.

I get the interest in providing choice, and I like having a couple ways of doing things available to me without an additional download. I strongly prefer the jwm tray to the cluttered desktop on 4.2. I feel like htop is far more functional than pprocess, but it's dropped in 4.3.

I guess I don't get why some choices are dropped, especially when they were part of a community-built and official release, while others (5 calculators) are added back in.

To go in the opposite direction of my last post, I question whether Puppy will ever become a community-driven distro. The previous model, in which it was basically Barry's distro, quirks and all, with various unofficial puplets from the community springing from it made a lot of sense. If I don't like the Five Calculators, fine; I just hide them everytime I upgrade.

If Puppy is going to evolve into anything other than Barry's distro, then the trust in a community-built release has to be there. What if 4.2 had actually been version 7.1, and then we get a version 8 that has all the same apps, albeit updated, from version 4.1?

Eventually, and I'm not saying it has to happen now, there has to be a shift such that the community-built editions have primacy over any one developer's vision. Maybe a "7.1 Barry Edition" would work in my previous example. It would certainly be immensely popular, but it would not make the community-built version seem like it was an aberrant offshoot of the "real" Puppy, the way 4.2 now seems to have been.

Perhaps rephrasing my question would help: why for God's sake have the five calculators returned to Puppy in the 4.3 release?

Barry has written, again and again, that 4.3 is all about perfecting the Woof buildsystem, not about perfecting the mix of applications. It is reasonable to assume that his pre-built .iso is a "kitchen sink" version, intended just to show doubters and fearful first-time do-it-yourself Woof-builders that all these apps really can indeed be built this way, and will indeed work. If you don't want five calculators, you can edit the Woof scripts to build Puppy yourself with just the ones you want.

Barry has written, again and again, that 4.3 is all about perfecting the Woof buildsystem,

which explains the original confusion. The version numbering makes no sense....since this bears little resemblence to 4.12 or 4.21 should it not have a different major version number like 5.x, 6.x or whatever.

All the puppy 2.xx versions were progressions on the same structure...1.xx was too. But refering to puppy 4.xx as far as I can tell there are at least 4 different core structures going on under that version.
Call a spade a spade....would avoid awkward questions and debates.

Barry has written, again and again, that 4.3 is all about perfecting the Woof buildsystem, not about perfecting the mix of applications.

Fair enough, but if it was to be so application-neutral, why not base it on 4.2? Going back to 4.1 makes a pretty strong statement that 4.2 and its associated apps are outliers from the general progression of Puppy.

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